GNU nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor.

First and foremost is its license: the Pine suite does not use the GPL or a GPL-friendly license, and has unclear restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico are not included with many GNU/Linux distributions. Also, other features (like goto line number or search and replace) were unavailable until recently or require a command line flag.

nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of Pico as closely as possible while addressing the problems above and perhaps providing other extra functionality.

It's that simple. Use --prefix with configure to override the default installation directory of /usr/local.

What's New in This Release:
This release contains several bugfixes.
Saving one file over another will now always warn about overwriting it.
Overwriting a file is no longer possible when saving a new file in restricted mode.
Zero-length Unicode characters are now highlighted properly when nano is built without regular expression support.
It also adds several minor documentation updates.